The Beach Club (37 page)

“He can have it.” Bill said. “I give up. He can have it.”

Therese held on to him. “Who can have what?” she asked. “What are you talking about? Who are you screaming at?”

Bill had lost his hope. He didn’t have the stuff in him; beneath his skin and bones and cartilage, he was dry, an empty gourd. He managed to close the hatch door, spurred on by what was now his hatred of this storm. Once the hatch was closed and locked, Bill followed Therese into the bathroom. He vomited into the toilet. He vomited up the Brazilian boys with their razor blades, and Cecily screaming with fear. He vomited up S.B.T. taking the Beach Club from him. He vomited up Dead and Missing. He vomited until it was all gone, and the inside of his mouth was puckered and sour.

Therese drew him a bath, and he gingerly lowered himself into the warm water. Therese sat next to him on the floor. He was the owner of a beach hotel waiting out a hurricane. Helpless. He was the father of a teenage daughter. Hopeless.

Maribel was on the phone with Tina when the power went out and the phone died in her hand. Maybe it was just as well. Tina had started to cry almost as soon as Maribel spoke.

“Mama, I’m going to break the engagement.”

“What?”

“It’s not meant to be, Mama. It’s not going to work.” Maribel had replayed the night before a hundred times in her mind. Something had broken inside her, and she lost control. She’d hurt Mack, she made him bleed. And he’d nearly snapped her hands off. They were finding new ways to hurt each other. It had to stop.

Tina hit full-blown snuffles, sobs. “You’re just angry, Mari. You’re angry at Mack now and you’ve been angry at him before. You’ll get past it.”

“I’m not angry anymore, Mama. I’m beyond angry. We don’t make each other happy. We don’t want the same things.”

“Why are you giving up?” Tina said. “Why after so long?”

Maribel heard the desperate note in her mother’s voice and she squeezed her eyes shut against it.
I want this for her
, Maribel thought.
I want to get married because I know it will make her happy. It will take away the demons of her loneliness, to know that I, at least, won’t have to spend my life alone
.

“Will you love me anyway?” Maribel asked. “Will you love me even without Mack?”

More sobbing. “You know I love you best of anyone in the world. You know you’re my number-one prize. If you made this decision, then it must be God’s will.”

“It’s my will,” Maribel said. “Mama, it’s my will.”

And then the power went out.

Maribel had candles and matches ready, and in seconds the apartment glowed with candlelight. She went into the bathroom and splashed water on her face, and then she opened a bottle of red wine.

Maribel toasted the air. “Fuck you, Freida,” she said. She sipped her wine. She would get good and drunk.

There were headlights in her window. Maribel saw the Jeep swing into the driveway. Her heart stood up. Mack hadn’t left her alone after all. He’d come home. Maribel’s mind stumbled over words for an apology.

Oddly, there was a knock at the door. A knock? Maribel flung the door open, and there, standing in the rain, was Jem.

As Jem drove the Jeep to Maribel’s apartment, he thought about the two words Neil Rosenblum had left him with:
Get her
. The wind was blowing so hard that Jem had to grip the steering wheel with both hands just to keep the Jeep on the road. The wipers flew back and forth, and at every low point, Jem drove through deep puddles that sloshed over the hood of the car. The rain was ridiculous, and Jem probably would have crashed if there had been other cars on the road. But from the look of things, Jem was the only one out. On his way to see Maribel, with Mack’s permission.

Jem pulled into Maribel’s driveway and switched off the ignition. The trees in Maribel’s backyard bowed in the wind, and a carpet of fallen leaves covered the grass. A heavy branch crashed to the ground. Jem ran like hell down the sloping side yard to the apartment. The gas grill lay on its side. Jem knocked on the door.
Be home
, he thought. Maybe this was all a joke—maybe Maribel was off-island.

But then she opened the door. The apartment was lit by candles.

“Jem,” she said. “I thought you were Mack.”

Jem’s heart sagged. Here he was standing out in the middle of a hurricane, and what did she say?
I thought you were Mack
.

“Mack’s at the hotel,” he said. “He sent me here to keep you company. Listen, can I come in?”

“He
sent
you here?” Maribel said. Her brow creased into lines that looked like an
M. M
for Maribel. Or more likely, an angry
M
for Mack. It occurred to Jem then that Maribel might not enjoy being handed off like a baton.

“Can I come in?” Jem pleaded. His shoes filled with water. The wind blew sideways. Another branch fell in the yard.

“For a minute,” she said. She ushered him in and slammed the door behind him. “So Mack sent you here. He
sent
you here.”

“Sort of.” Jem was afraid to move anywhere in the room. He dripped onto the welcome mat. “Can I take my shoes off?”

“You’re only staying as long as it takes you to tell me exactly what Mack said.”

Jem looked around, stalling for time. “You lost power,” he said. He needed to think. He felt hesitant to get Mack into trouble, since Mack was the one who gave him the okay to come. But that was the whole point. Mack was a creep. He was giving away his girlfriend.

“What did Mack say?” Maribel picked a glass of wine up off the coffee table.

“He said, uh…he said you’d be alone and that I should keep you company. And he gave me the keys to the Jeep.”

Maribel slugged back some wine. “So he’s pimping me out.”

“Excuse me?” Jem didn’t like the sound of that word anywhere near Maribel.

“He sent you over here because he wants us to have sex. That’s his way out of the relationship.” She finished her glass of wine and then she ripped her cardigan sweater right down the middle, so that the buttons popped off and disappeared into the shag carpet. Underneath the sweater, she wore a shiny blue bra, which she unhooked and flung onto the sofa. Jem was confused, but he couldn’t keep from looking at her breasts. They seemed fuller than they had at the beach that day.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She unbuttoned her jean shorts and let them fall to her ankles. She slid her hands inside her flowered panties and slipped these off as well. She stood before him, completely nude in the candlelight. Jem thought he might faint.

“You can take your shoes off,” she said. “And the rest of your clothes, for that matter.”

“What’s going on?” he said. His body screamed out for her. Her ass, the curve under her chin, the backs of her knees. But something was wrong. She was steaming like a tea kettle, and it wasn’t from desire for him.

“You’re angry at Mack,” he said.

“You’re damn right I’m angry!” she said. “He set all this up. I’m sure he thinks he’s doing us both a favor! But he’s manipulating our feelings. And guess what? I don’t care. He wants us to have sex, we’ll have sex.”

Just hearing Maribel say the words almost knocked Jem out. The front of his shorts was pitched like a tent. But this was wrong, everything about it was wrong.

“I love you, Maribel,” Jem said. “And I’ve never been in love with anyone before, but I don’t want you to sleep with me because you’re angry with Mack. I’m going home.” He opened the door, afraid to turn around and see what she was doing. He thought he heard her pour another glass of wine. He geared himself up to make a run for the Jeep, thinking if he timed it right he could run between gusts of wind.

Another branch fell, and Jem took that as his sign. He ran from Maribel’s house as quickly as he could.

Once he was safely inside the Jeep, he thought it might be okay to cry, or yell, or do something to release all his haywire, fucked-up emotions. The rain pounded on the top of the Jeep; it was like sitting inside a tin can. He turned the key in the ignition, praying he hadn’t ruined the engine by taking on those giant puddles. Fortunately, the engine started and Jem backed out of the driveway. He couldn’t see where he was going, but that mattered very little. He pulled onto what looked like the road and hit the gas.

He made it about a hundred yards when he saw red and blue flashing lights—a police car blocked Bartlett Road, the road that led to everywhere else. A policeman in a fluorescent orange raincoat waved his arms at Jem. Jem rolled down the window.

“All the roads are closed,” the policeman shouted. “You’ll have to go back to wherever you came from.”

“I can’t,” Jem said.

The officer shrugged. “I can’t let you on the roads. You’ll have to.”

“I can’t go back,” Jem said. “I live on Liberty Street.”

All Jem could see of the officer was his light blue eyes and his nose and his lips, which were scrunched together by his tightly drawn hood. “You can’t go on the roads.”

“Will you put me in jail if I try?” Jem asked. Jail was far preferable to returning to Maribel’s.

“No, I won’t put you in jail!” the officer said. “What I’m saying is, you can’t pass. I’m sorry. Now turn around!”

Jem managed to turn the Jeep around and head back down Pheasant Road. He considered pulling into a random driveway and spending the night there. Spending the night in his wet clothes in a chilly, wet car without food or water when the woman he loved was a hundred yards away? Jem pictured Neil Rosenblum shouting at him.
Get her!

Jem drove back to Maribel’s and sat in the Jeep, thinking of what he might say. Then he raced to the house and knocked once again on the door.

Maribel had put her clothes back on, although her cardigan hung open.

“I love you,” he said.

“Will you hold me?” she asked.

He nodded, and stepped inside.

Mack stayed at the desk by himself. At seven o’clock, when the power went out, he ran along the back of the hotel, knocking on the rooms’ back doors to make sure everyone was all right. Spirits were high. The guests lit candles, drank wine, ate sandwiches, read novels. When Mack was certain everyone was surviving, he returned to the desk. He sat by the light of three votive candles and listened. The wind was an opera—a baritone rumble and soprano whistle singing simultaneously. Mack heard sand hit the wall of the lobby, but not water. Not yet.

Mack wondered what was happening with Jem and Maribel. He wanted to race home and stop whatever was going on, but after the scene the night before, he knew he had no choice but to let Maribel go.
Let her go?
He gently removed the bandage from his arm and inspected his wound. He couldn’t believe she’d scratched him like that, he couldn’t believe he’d made her that unhappy.
This whole thing is wrong
. A six-year mistake.

By ten o’clock, Mack was tired of thinking. He stepped out the side door, and ran through a gust of sandy wind to Lacey’s.

She was sitting in her armchair with ivory beeswax candles burning and a Dewar’s on the table next to her. She wore her nightgown, a pink silk bathrobe, pink terry cloth slippers. The pictures of Maximilian had been collected into a neat pile.

“Max?” she said when he walked in. “Maximilian?”

Mack shook off water like a dog. “It’s me, Lacey, Mack.”

Lacey jumped. He wondered if he’d woken her. “Mack, dear, hello. How goes it?”

“Nothing’s flooding. That’s what’s important. There’s ankle-deep sand in the parking lot, but sand can be shoveled. Do you feel like talking?”

“Heavens, yes,” Lacey said. “You know me, I always feel like talking.”

Mack collapsed on the sofa. “What should we talk about?”

“Let’s talk about your wedding,” she said. “I want to buy a new dress. A bright red dress. I want people to call me a harlot!” She kicked her feet in their pink slippers. “You know, Maximilian and I actually got married twice. Have I told you that? We married the first time in November of ’41, just before Max went off to the war. Judge Alcott performed the ceremony on Madaket Beach and Isabel and Ed Tolliver witnessed. After the ceremony, the four of us went to the Skipper for lunch. Max left for Maryland ten days later for basic training. Then, a few months later, Max was shipped to the Philippines. Those were gruesome times, because the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and there was Maximilian, practically in Japan himself. While Max was in the Philippines, our friend Sam Archibald died over in Europe, and I had to write to Max and tell him that.” Lacey sipped her drink and stared into the candles. “Where was I headed with this story? Oh, yes, our two weddings. We had a church wedding when Maximilian returned. That was a waste of my father’s money. We were already married!” Lacey finished her drink. “Let’s talk about your wedding,” she said. “I only want to talk about things that are in our future. I spend far too much time talking about the past. And I’m stopping, right here, right now. Here’s to the future!” She raised her empty glass to him.

“I’m not going to marry Maribel,” he said.

“You’re not?” she said.

“No.”

“Have you told Maribel this?” Lacey asked.

“Not in so many words,” Mack said. Just thinking about Jem touching Maribel made him queasy. “But I think she has an idea. I don’t know how to explain it. I just can’t marry her.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me,” Lacey said. “I have long lived by the expression, ‘Nobody knows where it comes from, and nobody knows where it goes.’ Love doesn’t make sense most of the time and that’s what’s so wonderful about it.”

They were both quiet. Freida calmed down, too, but only for a second.

Lacey pushed herself up from the chair and took a few steps toward Mack. “Some days I think I’m old and wise, and other days just old. I’m going to bed. You’ll be in and out tonight, I suppose?”

“I’ll try to be quiet.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just make sure you blow the candles out. We wouldn’t want to burn down the cottage Big Bill left me.”

Mack hugged Lacey around the shoulders. “So you don’t think I’m crazy? Breaking my engagement?”